There are strawberries juuuuuuuust starting to ripen in my neighbour’s garden. There are service-berries juuuuuuuust starting to ripen on the trees around my neighbourhood.
There are no actual local berries (unless someone’s got super-early haskaps that I don’t know about) that are ripe just yet BUT by the time this moon waxes to full, there’s gonna be. So we’re calling this one berry moon.
I live in hope.
(Hahaaaaaa… I’ll get to that in a second).
So! The new moon’s in Gemini. Venus is (for the moment) in Leo. Summer Solstice is only a week away! We’ve been having thunder showers, muggy days, and kind of weirdly chilly evenings, this week.
I had a rotten day yesterday, and a good day the day before, and it’s been a reminder that accomplishing things makes me feel better about myself. Buying groceries and baking All The Things and harvesting the garden and doing a load of laundry makes me feel better about myself. Writing a poem makes me feel better about myself.
I have no idea how much of this is due to the whole capitalist notion that our value lies in what we produce or how much money we have, versus how much of this is due to the reality that moving around, tending things, and creating things, actually ARE good for me.
It’s probably a bit of both.
Beth, over at Little Red Tarot, talks about how Gemini (my rising sign, as it happens) is the sign of both/and. This new moon is a good time to write up a manifesto about personal integration (a bit like what Ms Sugar talks about when she talks about Black Swans).
She suggested a Gemini New Moon tarot spread on this subject, and I went ahead and did it.
Element of Self 1 (a theme/undercurrent in your life): Ace of Swords
Element of Self 2 (a different theme/undercurrent in your life): Five of Swords
What Unifies These Elements: Knight of Cups
How Can This Integration Be Expressed: Knight of Pentacles
The Ace of Swords is a mental multi-tool (literally, if you’re Cristy C Road). It’s a card of thinking things through, overcoming adversity, using your head. It’s a card of honesty, of seeing through illusions, doing what’s right and wanting what’s fair. It’s a card of communication, clarity, and self-awareness.
The Five of Swords, on the other hand, is a card of frustration, black-and-white thinking, and zero-sum games. In the Osho Zen deck, this card is called “comparison”, and it’s about… keeping your eyes on your own paper, striving for personal bests rather than worrying about being better (or not) than someone else. In the Next World tarot, however, this card is called “survival”, and it points to the way that people in Bad Situations will do unethical things in order to get what they need.
It’s weird to see the unifying theme of these two air cards be presented as the Knight of Cups. I mean, yes, this particular knight can succumb to the uglier side of Comparison through feelings of jealousy, insecurity, and inadequacy, and can also work the feelings side of self-awareness, seeking the Why of things, striving for self-improvement and understanding. So maybe it’s not that weird.
If my “Black Swan” is a combination of my best (Ace of Swords) and worst (Five of Swords) selves, than the way to be that fullest, truest self, is by being the Knight of Cups. (Ha… The artsy poet who wears her heart on her sleeve and likes pretty things and romance. Oh, hai…)
BUT… How do I express said Knight of Cups? Apparently by behaving like the Knight of Pentacles.
I think… Look, I tend to tie the Earth and Water suits together pretty closely. Partly because they’re both inward-focused elements – intimate & introverted rather than exhibitionist? In-so-far as those things can be thought of as having no overlap, which isn’t really the case – and partly because they’re both creative elements. But mainly because emotional stability and material stability are so tied up with each other.
However I think this reading is saying that the way to Be Your Black Swan without being, say, massively self-destructive or making a lot of the same mistakes over and over again, is to balance it out.
So, YES, be the knight of cups.
But balance the dreamy sentimentality and big-picture creative vision of Water with both the prudence and the step-by-step diligence of Earth.
The folks over at Hoodwitch tell me to “[Y]ou can knock it out of the park, but you have to remember what you came here for,” and I think that relates to this spread, and the integration of my best and worst Air characteristics through the art and heart of Water. Remember what I came here for, and then actually get it done.
Actually, on a related note, Chani’s Affirmation Horoscope this week (Scorpio) talks about the importance of maintaining and strengthening connections with collaborators, with people who support and encourage your best self, your most courageous self, and about noticing and figuring out the (internal and external) Stuff that gets in your way when you push to put yourself, your creativity, your Most You You, out there.
This is all kind of relevant (“kind of”), right now. I’m still job-searching. Which… if ever there was a process designed to tell you over and over that you’re worthless and nobody wants you? It’s trying to figure out how to word your extensive resume in a way that will let you look “good enough” to someone who wants professional experience in exchange for an entry-level wage, so that they will maybe deign to call you back. It’s super frustrating, and very scary at the same time. Because I feel like I have to be either/or, rather than both/and.
I want to use this new moon Both/And energy to help me with my frankly threadbare income quilt in a way that doesn’t feel like I’m coming from a place of scarcity or desperation.
The card I pulled for my Tarot Card Meditation was the Seven of Earth from the Silicon Dawn deck[1].
Tarot of the Silicon Dawn
Seven of Wands (which in this deck means the 7 of EARTH)
A small, hooded figure (who might be a Jawa), holding two walking sticks, stands in the doorway of a crumbling brick building. There are five branches lying on the ground in front of the door.
This particular seven of earth, with its crumbling building and cryptic, stick-based messaging system… is kind of creepy, tbh. Like the Collective Tarot’s seven of bones, which is just a bunch of teeth falling everywhere, a reference, I think, to that dream where your teeth crumble and fall out of your head, to tell you that everything is fucked and you can’t handle it.
Other interpretations are a lot more hopeful (haaaaaaaaaaaaa). Like the Next World image of an old lady selling home-beaded jewelry by the side of the road, labeled “Vision” (and Saturn in Taurus); or the Osho Zen version, which features a calm-looking, heavily pregnant person and a bunch of moon phases, and is called “Patience”. The Wildwood seven of earth is even called “Healing” and carries notes of divine intervention.
So what does this mean?
In a long-ago post, I talked about how the sevens are all linked to both hope and action, but also that this seven in particular touches on the fact that things take time.
I feel like I’m running out of time.
It’s an awful feeling.
It took ten years for me to build a modeling career. A career that I’m proud of and find fulfilling and that I actually enjoy. And I feel like I’m going to have to give it up, in order to take on work that pays less, wastes my time, depletes my creative energy, and makes me feel physically and emotionally like crap.
And I don’t want that to be how this goes.
So. Talking to my lovely wife over the phone, I told her about pulling this card, and what I said was: You may have to re-evaluate some stuff and make some choices. But don’t be hasty about it. You are going to start seeing results, the work you’ve been diligently putting in WILL start paying off. Just be aware that it takes a little while.
That it takes the heart-on-your-sleeve hope (the willingness to take risks and be vulnerable) of the Knight of Cups combined with the methodical action (like composition, editing, cold-calling, querying, and sending out submissions) of the Knight of Pentacles to get the results you want.
Summer Solstice is a week away. The sun – and all the things it metaphorically touches on – is at its biggest and boldest. It’s the point when all those seeds you carefully planted start to (literally or metaphorically) bear fruit.
While it’s hard to hold onto hope, especially when it feels like most of my seeds have germinated and then withered before they could really get established, I’m still keeping my fingers crossed for patience, for healing, for the chance to decode some secret, stick-based message, and get where I need to be going.
I’m modeling for a photography class in three hours.
I’m going to methodically get myself ready, put together a couple of looks for people to take photos of, do my hair and makeup (qua kosmesis), and then go Be Art for an evening.
And tomorrow?
Tomorrow I’ll light my altars and write some motherfucking poetry.
~*~
Movement: Has mostly been walking, this past couple of weeks. Yes, there’s also been gardening, but mostly my movement has been based around getting from place to place.
Attention: The wildlife in my back yard has multiplied. Babies every damn where. They are cute and also mildly worrying and, as such, are pulling a lot of my attention.
Gratitude: Grateful for the rain. For the zucchini plants starting to flower. For bread that rises. For rhubarb that grows in determined profusion. For ice cream being on mark-down. For yoghurt I can make from scratch. For a friend who shipped me cute and fancy clothes (and makeup and perfume, and the tiniest coach bag ever) from an entirely different country, just to help me out and make me smile. For $5 bags of un-dyed cotton crochet thread. For time to experiment. For old, beloved books. For not having to get up at 6am, three days a week (silver lining, right?) and for modeling coordinators who hire me because they know I need the work, and because I was brave enough to ask for it. For long baths. For friends who trust me. For a wife who thinks I’m beautiful and holds onto me all night long.
Inspiration: The deep, deep blue of a nearly cloudless sky, late last night when I walked home from my modeling gig, after an evening that was all thunder and rain. The bright gleam of those distant stars. The way the bee-balm and bleeding hearts come back, year after year, even in thin, rocky soil.
Creation: Urgh. I made a rhubarb-berry coffee cake and rhubarb muffins this past week. I also wrote one (1) poem. It’s okay. But more to come, right? More to come! 😀
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.
[1] So, when people design tarot decks, they often rename the suits. The suit of “earth stuff” (security, abundance, material things, bodies & embodiment, physicality, cash, housing, food, legacies, room-mates, relatives, etc), for example, which is traditionally called “pentacles” has been renamed a bunch of other things. Rainbows. Bones. Stones. Lots of things. In the case of the Silicon Dawn deck, from-which I drew the above card, the suit of “Earth Stuff” has been renamed “wands”. Which is annoying, sure, but not the end of the world. So I’m going with it.
Urban Meliad 